90 / CYCLE WORLD
“I said, ‘I’m getting a bit bored of
hydraulic oil.’
“He said, ‘That’s good—I think I
have a job for you.’
“‘What job?’
“‘I was thinking head of R&D.’
“‘Yeah, that would be great!’ That
was it: I moved to England.”
Tuluie brought one of Petersen’s
ideas to F1: a tuned mass damper
for a car.
“Neil reinvented the idea for
buildings, and I re-invented it for
F1 with Renault,” he says. “It took
off three-tenths of a second per
lap, and it helped us win the World
Drivers’ Championship.”
The device was compact but
heavy: Renault used 5-, 7.5-, and
10-kilogram masses depending on
the track. But F1 cars also carry
tungsten ballast to bring them up to
the regulation minimum weight, so
adding the damper simply meant
removing a chunk of tungsten from
beneath the car.
“It’s worth it,” Tuluie says, in his
typical understatement. His tuned
mass damper brought the under-
funded Renault team the champion-
ship in 2005 and 2006, after which
the system was banned—the true
mark of success.
Mercedes-Benz F1 called not long
after. Several F1 teams are located
near Oxford, England, so the job
swap didn’t mean a move, just an
altered commute. He had other
tricks up his sleeve—such as a wild-
ly complex, but passive, ride-height
regulator. A typical F1 car has about
6,000 parts, and his passive ride-
height system added another 2,000
parts, connecting the front andrear of the car to keep it level in all
conditions: full acceleration, deep
braking, and hard cornering.
Tuluie explains: “You don’t
want to dip the nose too much in
braking, because instability comes
when the weight is too light on the
rear. It’s instant, even with a 15 mm
dip. That doesn’t seem like a lot,
but negating that 15 mm gained
half a second per lap. At every
point on the track, the body was
within a millimeter of where we
wanted it. It was a flying hydraulic
computer, with dozens of passages
and jets and pistons and shafts and
seals, with elements in the front
and back. We also invented a fully
tunable air spring, so there were no
coil springs, no torsion springs—all
air. I got a patent on another system
we used, called a fluid inverter.”